"The Montreal Expos were leading the East and the Atlanta Braves by six games when the 1994 season ended after 114 games. It was somehow the second time a strike had affected Montreal's postseason ambitions. This time it stopped them cold.
"When the Expos made a run again in 2003, battling in the Wild Card race, they were denied the opportunity to make September call-ups by their owners (MLB). It was a move that most saw as the last straw for baseball in Montreal.
"Two years later, the Montreal Expos became the Washington Nationals, inheriting a history of postseason success that skipped the second Senators, who played eleven years in D.C. from 1961-71 without ever finishing higher than fourth in the American League, and went all the way back to the original Senators who last made a playoff appearance 79 years ago in 1933.
"Between 1924 -- when Walter Johnson, Goose Goslin and the Washington Senators were able to win the only World Series in D.C. baseball history -- and 1933, when General Crowder, Earl Whitehill, Joe Kuhel and the Senators lost the '33 Series to the New York Giants, the nation's capital's original Senators made three postseason appearances, winning it all in '24 and losing to the Pirates in '25 before the five-game loss in the final postseason appearance by a D.C.-based team eight years later in '33.
"It had been 79 years, many of them with no team calling the nation's capital home, before the Thursday's win guaranteed a return to the postseason."
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Washington Nationals Make D.C. Baseball Historysbn.to/PGyOQX
— SBNation DC (@sbnationdc) September 21, 2012